NEW YORK, NY – Psychiatrists and witch doctors are “first cousins,” a top psychiatrist declares.

NEW YORK, NY – Psychiatrists and witch doctors are “first cousins,” a top psychiatrist declares.

“It’s true,” says noted author Dr. E. Fuller Torrey.

“The similarities in techniques used by witch doctors and psychiatrists far outweigh the differences.”

And psychologist Dr. Stanley Krippner – who’s made an in-depthy study of witch doctors’ practices – pointed out striking similarities between African tribal medicine men and their counterparts in the psychiatric profession:

– Witch doctors and psychiatrists both prescribe medication.

– Another procedure they have in common is family therapy. Native healers work with the entire family, just as psychotherapists do.

– Both psychiatrists and their witch doctor counterparts work at correcting their clients’ bad behavior.

– Both psychiatrsits and native healers analyze their patients’ dreams as a means of psychotherapy.

– Native healers work with herbal remedies, which correspond to the drug therapies that are used by a lot of psychiatrists.

They even us an amazingly similar method of curing an age-old problem – bed wetting:

Witch doctors in Nigeria tie a special live frog around the offending child’s leg, said Dr. Krippner.

“If the child wets the bed, the frog gets upset by the moisture, croaks loudly and wakes up the youngster,” he explained.

And in our own society, some psychiatrists recommend that bed wetters sleep on a special pad that sounds a loud alarm when it gets wet, Dr. Krippner observed.